Social justice? What does it even mean?
I am not for social justice. I don’t even know what social justice means. I am for racial justice. For gender justice. For economic justice. I am for self-determination, bodily autonomy, and community that fights for each other and with each other. These are not social issues. These are political issues. My body and my community are political. Yours are, too, even if yours are less contested.
When we call political issues social issues we water them down; we make our calls for justice and liberation palatable to the institutions, powers, and popular mindsets we are railing against. We appease the power we fight against by making our inequality and injustice demure, domesticated “issues.” I don’t know about you, but when I feel dirty for being a class-passing working class person, when I get leered at for walking down the street in my leggings, when I got asked “how can you mutilate your body?” while preparing for top surgery and “do you regret being on hormones, having surgery?” now that I look like a girl again, these are not issues. This is the mundane violence of the capitalist world we live in, with its varied claims upon our bodies and lives.
So no, I am not for social justice. I want justice and righteousness to sweep through this world and get us ever so much closer to olam haba. It will not be clean and easy; it will not be domesticated. It will not be about social order. It will be about political and economic orders, about the very fabric of our collective, interdependant being. It will be about undoing all the violence we have wrought on this world and on each other. I don’t want social justice in this world and all its systems. I want us to change the world, to make it safe and whole for all of us.
